Characterizing Large Complex Natural Systems and Beyond
Organizer: Lorraine Denby
(ld@research.bell-labs.com)
Bell Labs--Lucent Technologies

Description:
This session will review a wide variety of topics often bundled under the rubric of ``complexity.'' While the material is likely to be new to statisticians, a number of motivating application areas will be presented that will make it both interesting and compelling to a statistical audience. One important point that arises from this discussion is that ideas from controls of uncertainty, robustness, feedback, interconnection, adaptation, and optimization are both essential to a useful theory of complex systems and poorly understood outside of a narrow technical community. Indeed, it will be argued that robustness tradeoffs are the dominant technical challenges in most of complex systems examples that will be introduced, and that control theorists, engineers and statisticians need to take a much broader and more active role in this subject.

Format:
The session will consist of a single presentation followed by several discussants. The talk will be given by a well known researcher in the area of control and dynamical systems. While the presentation will be tailored to a statistical audience, prominent members of the statistics community will help evaluate the new ideas.

Participants:
John Doyle (presentation, Statistics and Models for Complex Systems in Engineering and Biology)
John Doyle is Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and Electrical Engineering at Caltech University. Prof. Doyle received both BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from MIT in 1977, and a PhD degree in mathematics from UC-Berkeley in 1984. His research interests include integrating modeling, analysis and design of uncertain nonlinear systems, with applications throughout the aerospace and process control industries. His applications interests are motivated by the interplay between control, dynamical systems, and design and analysis of large, complex engineering systems. In terms of computation, Prof. Doyle is interested in analysis and simulation, including complexity theory as a guide to algorithm development. Prof. Doyle has received numerous awards including the 1991 IEEE Baker Prize (awarded once each year to the outstanding paper reporting new research results among all of the IEEE's over 50 technical journals) and the AACC Hugo Schuck Award for the 1994 American Control Conference.

Edward J. Wegman, George Mason University and Chris Barrett, Los Alamos National Laboratory (discussants)